Beyond the autopilot: the value of habitual behaviors for employee self-regulation, performance, and well-being
In today’s demanding workplace, employees must constantly manage multiple goals, which often requires significant mental effort. Traditionally, this self-regulation is viewed as a process of willpower and conscious decision-making. Iustina-Carmen Armașu’s PhD thesis, “Beyond the Autopilot: The Value of Habitual Behaviors for Employee Self-Regulation, Performance, and Well-being”, challenges this view by highlighting the critical value of habitual behaviors - habits, routines, and routinized task behaviors - as efficient self-regulatory tools. The research identifies three types of habitual behaviors and demonstrates that they allow employees to achieve goals with less cognitive effort, freeing up mental energy for more complex tasks. Beyond efficiency, these behaviors provide affective benefits, such as a sense of control and safety, and motivational benefits by signaling goal progress. A key study within the dissertation examined work routine disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings showed that employees who recovered their routines more quickly performed better, and that scheduling autonomy significantly accelerated this recovery. Additionally, the dissertation introduces a newly developed and validated Work Routine Scale (WRS), a tool to measure the characteristics and functions of routines, finding that routines have both daily and long-term benefits for performance and well-being outcomes. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that successful performance and well-being do not rely solely on deliberate effort. Instead, sustainable progress is often driven by the "ordinary magic" of habitual behaviors. By integrating automatic processes into our understanding of self-regulation, organizations can better support employee productivity and mental health, particularly in times of disruption.